Skip The Light Fandango
by SweetDeamon
Summary: "And they skipped the light fandango amidst a storm of rainbows as he gazed upon them in delight." RLNT. One shot.


_Note: This was originally 'Trip The Light Fantastic'. But 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' is one of my all time favourite songs...so..._

_I have no idea where this came from. Or if it even makes sense! After all, this is the weirdest perspective I think I've ever written from ever! But hey, I had fun writing it! So maybe somebody out there might like reading it too! So, here goes..._

_Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter._

**Skip The Light Fandango**

His first months revolve around a steady routine of smiling faces that, come his first birthday, he shall have forgotten.

But he examines them intently. He watches them, studies them, is consumed by them.

They are his everything.

They will soon be nothing.

But they are his entire world.

For now.

She has dark, twinkling eyes and soft pale skin that he reaches to skim his chubby little fingers against, and she catches his fist with a finger and presses damp, warm lips to his hand. Then she grins with pearly white teeth and he watches the way her tongue skims against them as sound rises soothingly from her throat. Her ears are small and studded with a twinkle at the lobe and her hair is a mass of silky colourful strands that he watches dangle about her temple, slipping over her forehead as she looks down at him. Sometimes she is framed in shades of pink, sometimes in shades of blue, sometimes she is framed in soft waves of pale gold that tickle her shoulders, sometimes she is framed in choppy strands of dripping wet darkness wrapped in the same fluffy material that she bundles him in after pouring warm water over him from head to toe. She is forever smiling, a touch of rose upon her cheeks and his heart leaps at the sight of her every single time.

He has warm, soft eyes and rougher, sometimes bristly skin that scratches intriguingly against small fingers, which seems to make one eyebrow creep up into an arch and then his thin lips curve too into a smile that never once falters, not even for a second. He has a longer face, a kind but busier face creased with thin little lines about his mouth and a pale slit along one cheekbone that warps and distorts when he moves his mouth. He is a fascinating study, with his often-wayward sandy hair and the small spec of a mole buried amongst his left eyebrow. His eyes crinkle when he shakes a little with a chuckle and he has a longer nose which is just about the right size to grasp in an inquisitive little fist. His face is a mixture of muted, reassuring, comforting colours, disrupted by a flash of pink when the tongue pokes suddenly from between his lips and gasped air emits an intriguing and unfathomably amusing sound that makes the pair of them snicker.

And he watches the two of them in his every waking minute.

He doses off to sleep at regular intervals, awaking to find one or sometimes even both of their faces peering down at him, and should he ever find himself without them they reappear swiftly should he care to wail. Sometimes he cries harder at the sight of them until he finds himself fed or changed, and when he falls back to sleep there is always a face gazing down at him with a smile.

When he awakes to darkness and summons them with a cry of protest he is always relieved at the sight of them. They take turns appearing above his cradle and scooping him up into their arms, but in the end he always finds himself set snugly in her arms upon a chair. He misses her careful rearrangement of her clothing because he is too busy screwing his eyes shut in his efforts to make his demands heard. Before long he finds himself silenced and content being fed, balanced carefully to her breast, and he listens to her humming softly, only for the sound to drift away as his steadily filling belly leaves him feeling content and drowsy.

Sometimes he cries for what seems like hours and they take turns pacing up and down with him set against their shoulder. His shoulder is soft and wooly and his steps long and carefully measured. Five paces to the window, then another five back to the door.

It takes her seven.

They set him down in a little basket heaped in blankets and he watches them move about the room, living their lives, talking and interacting with one another. When the light fades they sit down upon a chair together with his little basket set between them, and he gazes up at their faces as they look at him, look at each other...

Sometimes they lean towards one another and he watches unblinkingly as their lips crash together. Their eyes drift closed and suddenly the world seems smaller as they reach across the basket for one another, and he finds himself under a human canopy. Sometimes they draw back straight away, but every so often they remain clasped together until their faces grow pink and their breathing ragged. He watches their hands trail over one another searchingly, just as he has reached for them himself...

Sometimes, after such prolonged closeness and shortness of breath, they busy themselves with the loosening of clothes until he suddenly seems to draw their attention, then they gaze down at him, whatever urgent matter that had them fixated abruptly lost. Then they might sigh or laugh and he would find himself suddenly fussed over.

Suddenly whenever he cried he found that only she would appear to console him. She alone held him, bathed him, smiled at him, soothed him, and there was no sign of the other one at all. When the light faded for a third time, she sat in the chair in the room upstairs and whilst he fed he felt as if she were trembling. Her face grew damp and shiny and there were thin streams trickling from the corners of her eyes.

It had taken him some time to fall asleep that night, and yet he awoke soon after at the sound of a door creaking. Disturbed by the sound he had wailed to find himself alone in his cradle, only to find that she did not instantly appear to soothe him as she usually did. Wriggling and flailing, he had shifted enough to spy the room to the side of him, whereupon the sight that greeted him only made him cry louder in protest.

For they were both there, he could see them now as the door slammed shut, the two of them falling against it as she threw her arms around him, hold upon him fierce, fingers clasping at his hair as she pushed him back against the door. They stumbled and shouted, so consumed by the sight of one another that no matter how hard he cried they did not come to him. He watched in frustration as they clung to one another, her face buried in his shoulder before they tripped and stumbled forward to crash down upon the bed beside him. Her shouting was stifled by their lips colliding and for a moment he watched them tangle limbs together and slide fingers into one another's hair, still entirely oblivious to his utter desperation for their attention.

And suddenly they grew still, he leaning over her upon the bed, one hand pressed to her flushed cheek, the pair of them breathless...

_Shhhhh_, he said, without so much as a sideways glance at the cradle, and despite this the infant found himself pausing in his tantrum.

_Shhhhhh_.

The baby chewed bemusedly upon his own fingers as he watched their lips meet again, this time slowly, carefully, grasping hands replaced by careful, smoothing caresses.

_Shhhh_, he said again once he had drawn away for breath, and she seemed to go limp upon the mattress, sighing heavily.

The baby let out one last gurgle of protest, triumphant when he leant to press his lips briefly to her forehead before rising from the bed.

He watched the familiar face appear above the cradle and before he knew it he was being scooped up into a pair of careful arms.

They sat him upon the bed between them and he lay fidgeting upon the sheets, watching the two of them talk, the movement of their lips, the creasing of their brows, the way her eyebrows knitted together, the way he pursed his lips...

And from that day on, the routine changed.

He would not recall it, once they were lost to him. He would have no clear memory of what happened every afternoon from that day onwards.

And yet, perhaps he might, in some small way, for the infant found himself enchanted.

He would find himself carried out into the bright sunshine of the world outside, set down upon a mound of soft pillows and blankets amidst the grass, snugly beneath the rustling branches of a tree. Then he would watch the two of them draw thin shafts of wood from their pockets, gripped tightly in their hands as they went to stand upon the lawn, some distance apart, facing one another. For a long, curious moment they would stand, still as statues, staring at one another intently as he always gazed at them, then they would raise the sticks up into the air...

And she would always say:

_Ready?_

And she would always say:

_Ready!_

And it would begin.

And he would stare in wonder as they leapt and jumped, ducked, dived, sprung and spun back and forth across the grass, unblinking as bright lights and flashes of colour exploded and left glistening streaks through the air between them. There were bursts of blue, streams of scarlet, gushes of green, bolts so bright they blinded him as they whizzed back an forth at such speed that it was all he could do to catch a glimpse of their splendour. The lights left trails of twinkling stars that slowly faded away to nothing, or sometimes they were gone in an instant and he'd miss them entirely if he blinked. He'd reach his podgy little hands desperately up into the air in the hopes of touching their magnificence, but he could never reach far enough, even if he stretched with all his might.

And they skipped the light fandango amidst a storm of rainbows as he gazed upon them in delight. They twirled, bowed, threw graceful shapes into the air with their arms, their eyes never once leaving one another. Every so often the storm would end in an instant as a stick was thrown bizarrely to the ground, before it was retrieved and the dance would begin anew. Sometimes they danced for hours until the sunlight had seeped from the sky and the two of them grew damp with sweat that he could smell upon them when they retrieved him from where he lay, their hearts hammering in their chests and their voices grown hoarse.

Afterwards they would take him back inside, tuck him up in his basket with bright smiles and set him down upon the chair, and as he drifted off to sleep he would watch them standing in the middle of the room, held tightly in one another's arms, rocking back and forward to some silent tune.

And he would watch as she wept.

Day after day he watched their smiles, their tears, their laughter and their love. Day after day he watched the rainbow dance and night after night he would see streams of colour in his dreams.

Until one day, it stopped.

One day, everything changed.

There was no dancing, no wash of bright lights in the sky, and the two smiling faces that he knew so well disappeared entirely until they were gone from his memory for good.

There were new faces, after that.

She had a thin, pointed face and wrinkled skin about her dark, twinkling eyes, eyes that for a while seemed reassuringly familiar, and her hair was silky and brown, kept back from her face in a neat knot, the strands shiny and smooth against her head. She smiled at him with thin, pale lips and yet for ever time she smiled at him, she seemed to weep all over him twice as much. She was an older, sadder face than the one that had been before her, but she had gentle, calming hands and she sung him sleepy lullabies and fed him with a rubbery teat upon a bottle. Her grip upon him as she moved him from place to place, bathing him, soothing him, patting him carefully upon the back, seemed more confident than her predecessor, more natural as if she had done all of this before, and she talked to him constantly, a steady monologue of their days together that he could not understand and yet focused intently on nevertheless.

He was a lot younger than the one who came before him, and he appeared hovering above the cradle at irregular intervals as if he was not aware of the routine at all. Sometimes he was gone for days at a time and sometimes he was there only briefly, but he was a recognisable face nevertheless. He had dark messy hair and bright green eyes which were hidden behind a strange, cool contraption perched precariously upon his nose, something which required frequent investigation with little fingers, upon which the contraption would be removed and wiped liberally with the edge of a blanket. There was something a little awkward about the way he held the infant in his arms, as if he wasn't quite sure whether or not he was doing it right, and his eyes always grew wide should he find the front of his clothing splattered with vomit, which had always made his predecessor raise an eyebrow at most. But this new face grinned a lot and pulled funny faces and they often went for long walks outside, he tucked up in his pram, staring as the world drifted past with the soft rattle of wheels upon pavement.

He examines them intently. He watches them, studies them, is consumed by them.

They are his everything.

They don't dance and dodge rainbows.

But they are his entire world.

And as he watches them he grows, learns to mimic them, learns to crawl after them as they move about the house, learns to pull himself up onto his feet, learns to toddle haphazardly about the room. They teach him to talk with them.

He learns to name her, first, and when he can shout: 'Nanananana!' at the top of his lungs he does so with frequent gay abandon.

The second name proves problematic. 'Harry' has a few too many sounds to get his inexperienced tongue around, so he concentrates on the vowels and settles on 'Aaah-ee!' instead, which seems to get Harry's attention one way or another for the time being.

Sometimes Harry sits him down in his lap with a picture in a frame, points at the picture and repeatedly asks the same two questions until the child has fidgeted so much that he gives up:

_Teddy, can you say: Da-ddy? _

_Can you say: Mu-mmy? Go on Ted, say: Mu-mmy! _

One day Teddy grows so frustrated by this meaningless request that he yanks the frame out of Harry's hands and throws it on the floor.

Harry looks a bit cross. So once set down upon his wobbly little legs, Teddy makes a dash for the hallway. Nana has mistakenly left the back door to the garden open a little, and so he makes a curious beeline for the world outside, only to pause to spot something interesting upon the edge of the chest of drawers beside the door.

It is a thin shaft of wood, one end just a little thicker than the other, smooth and polished and somehow unbearable intriguing. He has seen Nana waving it around and pointing it at things and extraordinary things often seem to follow. He reaches up on precarious tiptoes for it, succeeding in knocking it from it's perch down onto the floor, and once he has bent down to retrieve it he turns it carefully around in his fingers, wondering what to do with his prize...

When his grandmother and godfather finally track him down five minutes later, having lost sight of him entirely in their fussing over a smashed photo frame, they find him out upon the back lawn.

He skips the light fandango on tottering, stumbling feet, waving the wand around wildly as he goes, dodging an imaginary storm of rainbows.

And once his godfather has dashed across the grass to pluck the wand from his fingers with wide, panicked eyes, his grandmother demands to know what on earth is doing.

And the little boy shrugs and says:

"Ready!"


End file.
